February 2006 Entries

[via Scott Hanselman] I really like Scott's blog and am a keen listener of his podcast. He had an interesting link recently to a tool from the XMLTools page on gotdotnet. It was to a tool called Microsoft XML Diff and Patch. What really interested me about this tool was the potential application to the SQL Server 2005 BI applications. Now, the connection here may not be immediately obvious, but XML is used all through the MS BI stack, and not just in .config files. Below is a short list of the main ......

[Via Darren Niemke] - And with a name like that how can he go wrong? :) An interesting list of some of the new feaures is available here. Last year, I blogged here about some of the new features coming in Sharepoint v3. What I found interesting about this list is that it includes a number of features relating to CMS. There was a rumour over 12 months ago that Sharepoint and CMS would be merging (after the two product groups moved into the same building on the Microsoft Campus), but it has only been ......

Have you ever run the KPI Browser and wondered how it produces its summary of KPI's. I had someone ask me about this today so I fired up SQL Profiler and had a look at the queries that were fired off while the KPI Browser tab was populating. What I found was that a number of XML/A Discover commands were executed, the Key one appears to be the one against MDSCHEMA_KPIS Here is the query I captured against the Adventure Works Database: <Discover xmlns="urn:schemas-microsof... ......

I got another head's up, this time from Marco at Groeneveld Management Services, about another open source OLAP application at www.palo.net, below is the Overview from their website: Palo Overview Are you working with big Excel workbooks that are difficult to maintain because of their size? Then Palo is for you. Palo is an advanced data store for Microsoft Excel that allows you to handle large amounts of Excel data on a small number of worksheets. In addition, it also allows you to share Excel data ......

I got an interesting email from Chris Harringtion today which I though I would share: Hey, I had a really interesting impromtu collaboration yesterday with Nickolas Goodman. The results of our experiment are posted to his blog at http://www.bayontechnologie... I ran my command-line XMLA client on my machine and made requests to his Mondrian XMLA provider. Before talking with Nick I had no idea that there was an open source ROLAP PTS and XMLA provider. ......

I sat for the beta of the certification exam for the 71-441 PRO: Designing Database Solutions by Using Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005 certification back in November last year. And I was just checking my MCP transcript online and noticed a new entry! Now, I am not normally in the habit of checking my online MCP transcript, but someone mentioned recently on the aus-dotnet mailing list, that they noticed a new entry on their transcript (for a dfferent exam) - so I have been checking my details ......

If you migrate an Analysis Services 2000 database to Analysis Services 2005 or if you have a database that has been edited directly you may find yourself without an upto date solution file. This is only really an issue when you want to make changes to the database and test them in a separate environment. Even then it is not much of an issue as you can easily create an XMLA script of the database and deploy it onto another server or instance. But BI Development Studio (BIDS) solutions do have a couple ......

[via Paul Gielens] I installed VS.NET 2005 on my laptop last year when it RTM'd, but I recently had to edit a VS.NET 2003 ASP.NET project on it and kept getting an error “Unable to start debugging on the web server “. I figured that the issue was probably related to the installation of .Net 2.0, but running aspnet_regiis -i, did not fix things. Even the initial results on a visit to Google did not look promising. The first few hits I got were not much help until I came across the blog ......

News

Legal
Any and all code, software, examples, suggestions and anything else on this web site is available for you to use at your own risk. No warranty is expressed or implied.
Views and Opinions
The views and opinions expressed on this web site are not necessarily the views or opinions of my employer.